In the conventional art, a journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of the changes that will be applied from a cache to storage in a log file in a dedicated area of the file system before committing the changes to a persistent disk.
The log file records the changes it will make to metadata of the file system prior to the changes actually being stored persistently. In the event of a file system crash the file system can be remounted and processing begins again by reading the log file and replaying changes from the log file until the file system is in a consistent state.
As the log file is central to all updates that are applied to the file system, the log file is a single point of failure. To secure the log file and provide protection against and ensure the integrity of a single point of failure, the log file is placed within a slice of a logical persistent storage device that is stored on a storage device group which provides redundant physical storage devices for each logical persistent storage device. In this manner, if a physical storage device storing the slice with the log file fails the data still exists on one of the redundant physical storage devices in the storage device group.